“The Bowdoin Project” is not without insight about some of the contradictions and shortcomings one finds, not just at Bowdoin, but at most other contemporary liberal arts colleges and universities, as well. Unfortunately, the report’s value is nearly buried by its unrelenting drumbeat for what its authors dare to claim is nothing less than the unvarnished truth, in contrast to the progressive ideology they identify with Bowdoin.
The problem, at least as I read it, is that their purported “truth” is itself an unarticulated ideology that underlies everything they say, yet it is by no means self-evident: that the privileged, white, heterosexual, Christian, American male represents the apotheosis of human civilization, and movement in the academy away from that notion represents a sharp decline in the quality of education.
Why else would there be such outrage at goals like diversity and global citizenship? (Perhaps inherent in that point of view is the dearth in the report of an ounce of humility, though the authors are quick to note its lack at Bowdoin.)
A disclaimer is in order. I am the father of two Bowdoin graduates—’07 and ’08—and am myself a 1967 graduate of Princeton. That makes me old enough to remember the supposedly halcyon days of liberal arts education to which Klingenstein, Wood and Toscano hearken, which, it turns out, weren’t actually so halcyon.
The changes in education that Klingenstein, Wood and Toscano decry began just after I graduated from college, and it is instructive to look at the timing. At that very moment, the Civil Rights Movement was reaching its peak just as the Women’s Movement was about to be born—two movements of liberation on behalf of people who, not incidentally, were largely excluded from the education the NAS report identifies as exemplary. My class of nearly 800 at Princeton included, I believe, six blacks and, of course, no women, and my contemporaries at Bowdoin experienced similar homogeneity. Why is that significant? Because when your education isolates you from reality and fails to break down prejudices born of that isolation, it can hardly be called exemplary. Worse, it reinforces illusions that can have catastrophic consequences.
In fact, the third great movement of the ’60s—the anti-war movement—exposed some of the disastrous limitations of an elite education in which the nation’s future leaders rubbed shoulders not with people of varying economic, racial and national histories who might have opened their eyes to both American and global realities of which America’s best educated citizens remained ignorant, but rather—and by design—only with people very much like themselves who would fail to challenge their provinciality.
Here is a case in point. The Vietnam War, in all its horror, stands as an indictment of the academic establishment that produced the conceivers and directors of that war, those whom journalist David Halberstam called, “The Best and the Brightest,” men who graduated at the tops of their classes at places like Harvard and West Point. And what they showed us was the dark underbelly of an education that convinced them they were the best but taught them nothing about the people whose lives they would devastate. Vietnam marks the nadir of American history not just because we lost the war but, far more tellingly, because, in the process, we sacrificed so much of what we had thought was bedrock American principle. We thought the Americans were the good guys who would never descend to rape and pillage; we were the hope of the world.
Ample evidence demonstrates, however, that even Americans are able to treat as less-than-human those they have never been taught to value as human, and rape and pillage is, in fact, exactly what we did. Because so much was covered up by the powers that be, we are only now discovering that we fought that war not so much against enemy soldiers, who in any case were no threat to the United States, but against civilians—both enemies and allies—whom we literally murdered not by the thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands but by the millions.
It’s what happens when your education fails to expose you to anyone other than people like yourself, and it’s why diversity is so crucial not just to the life of the academy but also to the future of the nation and the world.
All of what I’ve just written may seem a digression, but it is anything but. The Vietnam War gave the lie to any illusion that America had cornered the market on goodness and truth. In fact, we turned out to be just as prone as other nations to Lord Acton’s warning about power’s abuse, in no small measure because of the inadequacies of what we thought—and Klingenstein, Wood and Toscano continue to maintain—was a superior education. It was certainly, at least in part, the realization that the academy had reinforced some of the wrong values in its graduates by exposing them only to people like themselves that led to such policies as affirmative action, an increase on many campuses in international students, and a widespread belief that diversity in educational communities is essential to the health of the educational enterprise. Certainly, not all racial, religious, sexual and gender prejudice has been erased. But few would argue that the dramatic speed, for example, with which homosexuality in American society has moved from the closet to legitimacy owes a great deal to the level playing field most universities and colleges attempt to provide for people of varying sexual identity.
I quite agree with the report’s authors on the essential importance in education of basic principles. Where we differ, however, is that while, like me, they would surely be proud to proclaim America’s founding principle of “liberty and justice for all,” they have failed to follow that principle through to its logical conclusion. Liberty and justice for all—even those outside our borders—doesn’t mean Americans get to run the world; it mandates us to help build a world in which power is shared among all who believe in the principle. It is a call, whether the report’s authors like it or not, to global citizenship. Likewise within our borders, promotion of liberty and justice for all beckons from each of us a commitment to the common good, in which everyone, not just a privileged elite, has equal access to power. That is decidedly not the kind of world the educational establishment of old produced or even desired.
Certainly, like every institution, Bowdoin has been guilty of hypocrisy as it has attempted to correct its course to respond to these challenges, sometimes missing the mark by an inch, and sometimes, no doubt, by a mile. Indeed, the report’s authors seem to me justly critical of the near absence of conservative faculty on a campus committed to diversity and openness. Bowdoin students do often graduate with a prejudice against conservatism, fueled by the same lack of exposure as the prejudices of earlier generations. Likewise, I share their concern that the current curriculum may fail to encourage sufficiently either comprehensive mastery or a broad integration of students’ intellectual experiences. These, of course, remain difficult dilemmas for most academic institutions. So, yes, there are both excesses and omissions at the Bowdoin of today, as there always have been. The College has miles to go before it sleeps.
Unfortunately, the NAS report’s often valid pedagogical and philosophical observations are undermined by its unrelenting smugness as well as its apparent nostalgia for a privileged, all-white, all-male, all-American Bowdoin that social progress has long since rendered obsolete. And for what it’s worth, this privileged white Christian American male, who has known such institutions first-hand, does not mourn their passing.
Rev. Frank C. Strasburger is the former Episcopal chaplain at Princeton and resides in Brunswick.